The Judge Dredd Megazine is serialising a French WWII graphic novel, "under the new ‘Battle presents…’ banner, reviving the name of one of the greatest comic books in UK publishing history."
https://2000ad.com/post/4814

Berger Books continues to show promise for Dark Horse. Two new books have been announced for early 2019; a new J.M. DeMatteis series and a creator owned book from G. Willow Wilson.
Wilson's book will be a science fiction story with political overtones.
DeMatteis' new series is called the Girl in the Bay, and sounds like a return to the sorts of themes used in his early work at Vertigo.
The imprint also has a strong showing from prose genre writer, Nnedi Okorafor, currently.
This is the type of premise I wanted to see from Berger Books, reminding me more of what Vertigo Comics used to represent.
Only Nocenti's The Seeds reminded me of better-days Vertigo from the initial launches. That book ended up being delayed and then left unfinished (after only two issues), sadly. It showed a lot of possibility.

It looks like Marvel is back to "no more mutants" again.....
Meanwhile, the Return of Wolverine debacle continues to stretch on, with long delays. I've never seen such a botched attempt to bring a once-popular character back. Sadly, the fact that Marvel couldn't allow a property which was once Marvel's most popular to fade for a few years means that Marvel put out about six replacement characters to fill the void of Wolverine being dead, so no one actually ever missed Wolverine in the first place.
Marvel had a chance to put the X-mythos on the shelves for a few years, back when there was all the controversy over the movie rights. It would have been the perfect time, and then let a creative team with a strong vision for returning the X-Men with a real purpose take over when that right creative team came along.
No, because the X-Men books were still strong sellers (not that strong anymore, but hey, it's comic books in the 2010s, so you can't expect much), Marvel decided they couldn't just stop publishing new X-Men comics. Instead, they decided they would publish really bad X-Men comics to make the fans hate the X-Men, and transition to the Inhumans being just as popular as the X-Men.
Then, sales of the mutant titles started to do really bad, while sales of the Inhumans titles were just as bad, and then Disney ended up with the movie rights to the X-franchise in the end, so Marvel had to scramble to try to undo the fact that they had told readers, "You don't care about these characters anymore!".
Yet, Marvel has absolutely no real direction for these characters. It's just sad.
The X-Men properties (outside of some strong spin-off books over the years) have been in a real dire position almost since Claremont left Uncanny X-Men. The Scott Lobdell 1990s era has some fans, I realize. The Grant Morrison run was pretty strong. Otherwise, X-Men has been a book with struggling creative teams, but overall, strong sales figures.
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You can't trust Marvel to not mess everything up though. They actually did retire the Fantastic Four for a few years, and then brought back the comic, to wide-publicity. Still, the comic reads as if Marvel is just publishing a Fantastic Four comic for the sake of publishing a Fantastic Four comic. They didn't bother to find a strong, new creative direction to take the book. They just handed it to Dan Slott and let the mediocrity immediately return to the title.
So, even had Marvel decided to let the X-books lie for a few years, it would probably still be a mess.
Every so often, modern-day Marvel lucks upon a good decision, like allowing Al Ewing to fully realize his vision for a Hulk comic book, so the Hulk comic is actually readable again after I don't even know how many years. After Ewing, it'll probably return to more bad creative decisions and end up in the doldrums for years all over again. That's just the way of modern Marvel. They can put out a few titles worth reading, while most of their titles exist solely for the sake of trademarks and movie advertising.

I caught up on the Uncanny X-Men relaunch up through this week's issue # 10, and boy howdy is it a fucking mess. The Avengers creative teams did a pretty great job with this weekly one-series gimmick during "No Surrender" last year, but the X-Men teams have really struggled to make this anything other than a 3 issue story stretched out waaaaaaay too fucking long. And at the end of the day, this 10-issue relaunch is nothing but a trailer for another crossover event. So very disappointing that Marvel just can NOT get the X-Men right, that franchise has been fucked for years now.

Marvel Comics Presents #1-Geez, that was a complete waste of $4.99. Ugh, that was probably the worst Anne Nocenti story she ever wrote.
A Captain America story by Nocenti, and it's not political? What a waste.
That wasn't the worst of it though, as the story read like a G.I. Joe PSA from the 1980s.
This was just terrible. I can't believe this was Anne Nocenti's return to Marvel, to write this one horrible short story.
There was a Namor story by Greg Pak which was ok. It didn't make up for my paying $4.99 for a terrible comic book, but that story wasn't bad, it just wasn't worth the price.
Conan #2-I am glad that I decided to buy this. I take back my complaints from the first issue. Aaron knew what he was doing, and did not let me down. This was an excellent Conan story.
Aaron has an over-arching story running in the book, but it's not as simple as chapter one, to be continued, chapter two (as per my initial complaints). The stories, at this point, can be read as mostly self-contained.
I'd recommend checking out this comic if you want a really well-told Conan story. I was impressed.

Les Batman-y but spoilery: some notes that may reveal plot points about the first issue of Goddess Mode. (Said spoilers are freely available elsewhere, including on the comic's cover, but are still a big first issue climax so are being hid below. It's dubious that anybody wants to read a review of this anyway.)

Peter Milligan is another name that comes to mind now who'd have been a good choice too. That "Dark Knight, Dark City" story-arc he wrote was good enough to warrant him getting an invite, especially over some of those names.
Dixon is the one famous Bat-scribe I can do without. I didn't enjoy any of Dixon's work on Batman. Moench had a famous run on Batman in the early-1980s, and his work with Kelley Jones on Batman in the mid-'90s was one of the classic Bat-books. So, Moench is more than redeemed for his early-'90s stupidity, unlike Dixon.

TBH, no Dixon is probably a good thing since his story probably would've consisted of Batman teaming up with Trump and Bane to put those Libs back in their place!
But just the prospect of reading more Kevin Smith Batman is enough to avoid a purchase of that!
Tomasi's always struck me as a competently unremarkable at best writer, in that he's never written anything blatantly offensive or terrible but never has quite written anything that would rank up there amongst the greats. I wonder if that's a better or worse fate for Detective Comics than Action Comics, which was taken over by Bendis after its 1000th issue.
Johns and Bendis are pretty big name writers, but Batman's not exactly the first character that pops to mind when you think of their all-time must-read comic runs. In the case of Johns, his Batman Earth One books probably skew closer to the must-avoid stories! Likewise, Ellis and Priest are good writers, but they're not exactly writers I'd associate with Batman.
In that list, O'Neill and Dini seem to be the only non-recent major Batman writers doing stories. No Grant, Englehart, Moench, or even Miller. Morrison somehow missed out on both the 1000 celebrations for Batman and Superman, and while Brubaker seems to have sworn off Big Two work at the moment with his Image exclusive contract, where's Rucka for that matter?

Of all the past Batman creators to get for an anniversary celebration, Kevin Smith would probably be on the bottom of the list. Who in their right mind would read Cacophany or Widening Gyre and then say "yeah, Kevin Smith GETS Batman"? To think, there's no Grant Morrison, no Alan Grant, no Chuck Dixon or Doug Moench, but we get Smith. Seems fair. 🤮

Happy new year all!
Nothing new for me this week, currently reading Milligan and co's Bad Company in which a rookie suddenly finds himself running with a squad of proper nutters in a war against the alien Krool. Hundred or so pages in and it's been pretty good, the alien design is real silly which is probably intentional but the story itself is the kind of grim dark I eat with a spoon.

DC has announced plans for the upcoming Detective Comics #1,000, which is going to be written by that hot superstar writer....Peter J. Tomasi? That guy sure did luck out being the current regular writer on Detective Comics, giving him the nod to pen this landmark issue.
Of course, DC will also be featuring short stories by lots of other celebrated comic creators to make the issue actually feel special.
It would have been nice had DC tried to get some of the big names from the past who actually made a mark on the Batman franchise, instead of including a bunch of writers who aren't exactly known for their work on Batman.
I was pleased to see that, at least, Denny O'Neil will get a story.
Warren Ellis gets a story....for those (what?) two stories (that no one remembers) which Ellis wrote for a Bat-book. I remember an awful LOTDK story by Ellis, and a forgettable back-up story in that Batman black and white on-going series....I forget the title now. Was it called Dark Knights, maybe?
It would have been appropriate to see Steven Englehart or (especially) Alan Grant featured. DC continues to undervalue the contributions of Grant to the Bat-franchise.
Considering the book will cost close to $10, I have no interest in picking it up just for the O'Neil and Ellis stories.
https://www.cbr.com/detective-comics-1000-creator-lineup-announced/
At least it'll be more special than Batman #500.